


a storm in your heart

by nightswatch



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Past Abuse, Pre-Epilogue, Storms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 13:24:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7440901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightswatch/pseuds/nightswatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a storm coming and Ronan and Adam are stuck at the Barns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a storm in your heart

There’s a storm coming. Ronan can smell the oncoming rain, he can feel the electricity building in the air. The grass ripples like the sea, the trees whisper, the beginnings of the storm tugging at their branches and shaking their leaves.

Ronan didn’t mean to spend the night at the Barns – Adam didn’t either, for that matter, but he’s here with him now and neither of them is going anywhere – because they had plans with Gansey, but Ronan had a lot more work on his hands than expected all of a sudden. He goes through his list again. Opal is with Gansey, safe and sound, all doors and windows are firmly shut, everything that could be carried away by the wind is secured, the car is out of harm’s way, Chainsaw is up in Ronan’s room, Adam is waiting for him inside the house. 

He’s walking across the field, the wind relentlessly pushing him forward, when the rain starts. It’s not a few subtle spatters of rain that warn him of the downpour that is about to follow; the clouds simply burst and Ronan is soaked to the bone in the blink of an eye. 

It really doesn’t matter if he runs or not. 

Ronan clambers over the fence and makes for the house. The door opens a moment later and Adam appears, smirking at Ronan when he ducks under the roof of the porch. 

“Need a towel?” Adam asks.

“Fuck off,” Ronan says and sprays a few drops of water in his direction. Ronan’s clothes are clinging to his skin. Adam looks severely unimpressed, but Ronan doesn’t miss the way that Adam’s eyes dip down to his chest for the briefest of seconds.

Ronan looks out at the pouring rain. The sky is turning dark rapidly and the world is bleak and grey. Adam tugs at his shirt. Ronan turns his head and finds Adam smiling at him and suddenly the world isn’t so bleak anymore. Another tug and Ronan tilts his head and Adam kisses him, pulling Ronan against him. Adam is warm and his hands are insistent, sneaking under Ronan’s sticky shirt, fingers digging into his skin.  Ronan kisses him back and he feels like nothing in the world could make him stop right now, not as long as Adam doesn’t want him to pull away, not as long as Adam is holding him like he couldn’t possibly let go. Ronan never wants him to let go either. 

Everything feels strangely fragile these days. They’re all done with finals, except for Blue, but it’s only a matter of a week, then she’ll be free to go wherever she wants and Gansey will go with her. Adam will go, too. Not as soon as the others, but he will and he won’t be a million miles away but that doesn’t change that he won’t be here. 

Ronan isn’t sure what to do with those thoughts yet. Things between him and Adam are fragile as well. 

Finals wore on Adam, and together with work, he was down to the last one percent more often than not at the end of the day. He was jumpy and moody and the other day– It doesn’t matter. They’re fine now. They’re fine and yet Ronan can’t shake the thought that they should talk. Because maybe they’re not as fine as Ronan would like to make himself believe. 

He runs his fingers through Adam’s hair and stills against him and they just breathe the same air for a little while. He should say something. “Adam,” he says, just _Adam_ , and it’s not enough, but he can’t bring himself to say more than that. 

Adam kisses him in reply, so gently that Ronan is afraid that Adam knows how fragile all of this feels to him. 

The wind sweeps rain under the roof of the porch and a few drops land on Ronan’s face and Adam’s lips taste like rainwater. Adam smiles against his lips and as much as Ronan doesn’t want to move, the wind is picking up and they should really get inside. Ronan nudges Adam over to the door and into the house, where it’s warm and dry and where Adam peels off Ronan’s shirt with a smirk on his face.

“Better get changed,” Ronan says and nods at Adam’s shirt that also has a big wet spot in the middle now. “Both of us.”

Ronan finds himself dry clothes, finds Adam a shirt that is slightly too big on him and pulls him back downstairs afterwards. Adam makes cocoa – where he found it is anybody’s best guess, but Adam swears that it’s not out of date, so Ronan accepts his mug with a shrug. 

They end up on the sofa, on opposite sides, their feet tangled in the middle. They don’t talk, but every now and then, Adam pokes at Ronan’s foot with his toes. Ronan still hasn’t decided if he should say something. No, actually he has already decided that he should say something, he just hasn’t decided on what to say yet. 

He’s been hoping for a quiet evening with Adam for so long. An evening where it’s just the two of them, with no finals on the horizon, with no one to barge in on them, just him and Adam, just for a few hours. And now he can’t enjoy it because his thoughts won’t leave him alone and because he can’t stop looking at Adam, trying to figure out if he looks at him differently somehow. 

But Adam is looking at him like he always does, only today his eyes aren’t as tired as they usually are and there’s a quirk to his lips that doesn’t go away. 

Adam puts down his mug and leans closer to Ronan, reaching out to tug Ronan’s mug out of his hands. Ronan’s mug, half-empty, joins Adam’s on the table and then Adam is looming over him, all dishevelled hair and too-large shirt and glinting eyes and Ronan wants to tell him how beautiful he is, but instead he pulls him down and kisses him and hopes he understands. 

Thunder rumbles in the distance and Ronan feels it resonating inside him. Adam has him pinned on the sofa while the storm rages outside and there no place in the world he’d rather be. Ronan barely hears the rain, barely notices the lightning. Adam is all there is. 

Adam stills when the lights flicker and stares at the lamp overhead like he can somehow negotiate with it. 

“I’ll go find a flashlight, just in case,” Ronan says. He’s almost disappointed when Adam climbs off him all too quickly and he almost smiles when Adam follows him into the kitchen. 

It’s Adam who finds a bunch of flashlights in a drawer. He turns one of them on, but it doesn’t even flicker. “Batteries?”

Batteries, it turns out, are hard to come by in the chaos that is the Barns’ kitchen.There are all kinds of unusual things tucked into those cupboards, but it seems that no one has ever had the idea of dreaming up something as mundane as batteries. Or a flashlight that works even without batteries. Ronan makes a mental note of that. 

They keep looking, cupboard doors slamming, strange devices tumbling into their hands, but their search was futile from the start. 

Adam makes a triumphant sound and holds up a bag of tea lights. “I guess these will do.”

“I guess,” Ronan says and grabs a box of matches with one hand and the hem of Adam’s shirt with the other to pull him back to the sofa. 

The lights flicker again on the way back through the hallway. He hopes that the power won’t go out at Monmouth. 

Their cocoa is lukewarm and Ronan ignores the rest of his while Adam finishes his own. He stares at his phone, sitting on the table. Gansey would have called if anything at all was wrong. Opal is in good hands.

Thunder roars, much louder than before, and Ronan, for some reason, expects the earth to shake for emphasis. Adam glances at the rain-spattered window, his eyes a little too wide. Ronan waits until he’s done with his cocoa and then pulls him back down on the sofa with him, Adam’s head pillowed on his chest and his hair tickling Ronan’s chin. 

A few minutes later, a few minutes that Ronan spends trailing his fingers along Adam’s spine, the lights go out. The rain sounds much louder all of a sudden. Adam moves, his face ghostly white when lightning strikes and illuminates the living room. Still perched half on top of Ronan, Adam strikes a match and lights a handful of tea lights. 

“Good enough,” Adam says and lies back down, wedged between Ronan and the back of the sofa. He dips his head down and kisses Ronan’s neck.

Adam’s features are soft in the candlelight. Ronan steals a kiss and keeps him close. His fingers trail over freckles, over soft skin until they meet calloused fingertips. Adams sighs and there’s weariness to it, but also contentment. He’s pliant and at ease and Ronan wants them to be like this, exactly like this, for the rest of the night. He couldn’t possibly say anything now, not when Adam looks so pleased, not when his smile is so soft.

“You look like you’re about to seductively hum the Murder Squash song in my ear,” Adam says, eyebrows raised. “Or am I just giving you ideas now?”

Ronan huffs.

“Ronan?”

“Shut up, Parrish,” Ronan says but he doesn’t sound like himself. And how could Adam not notice? Adam _knows_ him.

“What is it?”

The candles flicker. Ronan doesn’t want to look at him. Adam sits up and that makes things a million times worse because now they’re going to have this conversation and Ronan isn’t ready for it. 

“Talk to me,” Adam says. But that’s exactly the problem; the problem is that Adam didn’t talk to him. 

Ronan sits up as well. “Fine,” he says. There’s no way around it now, so he might as well just say it. “Do we need to talk about what happened the other day?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” Ronan says. Adam stares at him like he wants him to say it. “At Gansey’s. When I came up behind you. You flinched.”

“I didn’t,” Adam says, except that he did. Because he knows exactly what Ronan is talking about. 

“Parrish,” Ronan says.

“Would it make you feel better if I told you that it wasn’t your fault?”

“Only marginally.” Ronan puts his hand in the space between them. Adam takes it after a moment, his fingers slipping under the leather bands that are tied around Ronan’s wrist. “Why didn’t you say anything?” Ronan asks.

“Because it’s not a big deal,” Adam says. 

Ronan begs to differ. He can’t stand the thought of Adam being scared of him, even if it was only for a second. 

“It really wasn’t your fault.” Adam squeezes his hand. “You caught me off guard, I was having a shitty day already and I just wasn’t… I don’t know. It had nothing to do with you, specifically. Sometimes it just… comes back up again. You didn’t do anything wrong, I swear.”

“I don’t care if it wasn’t my fault,” Ronan says. He hates that his anger is sneaking into his voice. He’s mostly angry with himself because he didn’t think. “I don’t want it to happen again. I’d never–” Adam’s finger on his lips silences him instantly.

“I know,” Adam says. “You’d never hurt me. Isn't that enough? That I know? That I trust you? Because it’s enough for me.”

Ronan stares. He stares because Adam trusts him and even though he knew, somehow, Adam has never said it before today. There was no reason for him to say it.

Adam pulls away his hand and stares back at him, waiting. 

“Yeah,” Ronan finally says. He’s never been much of a talker. Not when it comes to anything remotely serious. That’ll also have to be enough. 

“Good.” Adam takes Ronan’s hand again and kisses his palm like Ronan always does and it strikes him like lightning.

Ronan pulls Adam into his lap and buries his face in the crook of his neck. He hates that Adam got hurt, he hates that it still haunts him, he hates that there’s nothing he can do. There’s nothing that can quell that anger and all he can do is clench his fingers in Adam’s shirt and swear that he’ll never break his trust. 

Adam’s hand curls around the back of his neck. “It’s okay.”

“That’s not how it fucking works, Parrish,” Ronan says. “You’re not the one who’s supposed to say that right now.”

“Shut up, you’re not making the rules.”

The rain is still pattering against the window, but not with as much force as before, and the thunder is nothing more than a distant, barely audible rumble. The storm has passed but the lights don’t flicker back to life yet.

Ronan isn’t in a hurry. He wouldn’t mind staying up all night and looking at Adam’s face in the candlelight. 

“Ronan,” Adam says. He pulls away, not far, but far enough so Ronan can look him in the eyes. “I’ve been thinking…”

Ronan waits. He has a feeling that they’re not through with the overly grave topics. Two serious conversations a night seem excessive, but they might as well get it over with. Maybe it’s just a good night for that sort of thing. 

“I think I should go talk to them,” Adam says, his eyes never leaving Ronan’s. “Before I leave for college.”

“Wait,” Ronan says. “Them?”

“My parents.”

“You want to talk to your parents.” Ronan does nothing to keep the disbelief out of his voice. “Why?”

“Because I owe it to myself,” Adam says. It sounds simple but it isn’t. Nothing has ever been more complicated.

But Ronan can’t argue with that, as much as he wants to. If that is what Adam wants, there’s no point in even trying to convince him otherwise. “I’ll–”

“If I go, I’ll go by myself.”

“I don’t like it,” Ronan says.

“I didn’t ask you if you liked it,” Adam replies, his voice low, steady. “I just wanted to tell you that I was thinking about it.”

Ronan chews on his bottom lip. “Fine, I’ll shut up,” he mutters, instead of saying _I’m glad you told me_. 

“I’ll know where to find you if I change my mind,” Adam whispers and kisses the corner of his mouth. 

Adam pushes him back down on the sofa, hands wandering under Ronan’s shirt. They’re done talking for now. Ronan’s heart gives a flutter. 

Adam Parrish is like a storm in his heart and right now he feels like he can never be still again. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is a thing that happened while I was procrastinating.
> 
> Kudos and comments are appreciated, as always :)


End file.
